Two years ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal financial regulatory agency, announced it was forcing Toyota Motor Credit to give consumers back tens of millions of dollars. While selling bundled auto insurance and car-servicing products, Toyota dealers had “lied about whether these products were mandatory” and sneakily included them in contracts without borrowers knowing it, said the CFPB in a press release, citing consumers’ complaints.

Even more maddening, when consumers called Toyota to cancel the unwanted add-ons, representatives had been trained to keep promoting the products until the customer asked to cancel three times. Then customers still couldn’t cancel during those calls–they had to take yet another step and submit a written request. Between 2016 and 2021, Toyota funneled 118,000 calls to this hotline. In 2023, the CFPB ordered the company to give customers back $48 million and pay a $12 million fine for these and other violations.

But earlier this year the Trump Administration, in its quest to roll back financial regulation, erased that ruling, terminating Toyota’s obligation to pay consumers the $48 million. The same thing happened to a CFPB settlement with large credit union Navy Federal. The financial institution had agreed to give $80 million back to consumers for improperly charging overdraft fees while customers (including active-duty servicemembers and veterans) showed a positive balance at the time of their transactions, an order that has since been reversed.

Toyota didn’t respond to Forbes’ requests for comment. In a statement last year, Navy Federal said it would “continue to comply with all applicable laws and regulations, just as we always have and as we believe we did here.”

In permanently dismissing 22 CFPB enforcement actions, the Trump administration has caused at least $120 million due to be paid to consumers to stay in companies’ pockets. And if the current administration continues canceling CFPB orders, another $240 million slated to be paid out might not reach consumers either, according to not-for-profit consumer advocacy groups the Consumer Federation of America and Protect Borrowers.

At the urging of Trump nemesis Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congress created the CFPB after the Financial Crisis as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2010. The agency was tasked with enforcing financial laws, making regulatory rules and supervising financial services companies–especially non-banks, since they often fell in the gaps between banking and securities regulators. Since its creation, the CFPB has ordered companies to provide $20 billion in relief payments to 195 million consumers and to pay $5 billion in fines.

The Trump Administration has brought nearly all of that activity to a halt. This year, the CFPB will likely bring the lowest number of enforcement actions since its inception, and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting head of the CFPB, recently said he aims to shut the entire agency down in two to three months.

“Never before in the CFPB’s short history have we seen such an almost complete abandonment of its obligations under the law,” says Eric Halperin, the CFPB’s former enforcement director who left the agency in February. The Office of Management and Budget didn’t respond to Forbes’ emails and phone calls requesting an interview and written responses to questions.

Vought’s moves are part of a broader plan to dramatically shrink the size of the government. He seems to view the CFPB as duplicative of other regulatory agencies and hostile toward businesses. Rohit Chopra, the head of the CFPB under President Biden, was often criticized by industry executives and accused of bringing enforcement actions that went beyond the CFPB’s legal scope of power. But former regulators and financial services executives we spoke with for this article all believe that killing off the CFPB will do more harm than good.

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